Long Nice Walk

Siem Reap

Siem Reap is on most people’s hitlist when they come to Cambodia as it is the closest town to the ruins of Angkor. It was also the closest town to the school we were volunteering at, so every Friday at 4pm, we would get collected by a tuk-tuk, bump along the sandy road out of the village and enjoy 2 nights of what felt like luxury (a pizza, beer, clean sheets and a hot shower).

It wasn’t quite the sleepy town I was expecting when we first arrived, there are lots of bars and restaurants and quite a buzz to the streets when the sun goes down. There are hundreds of guesthouses, all offering big clean rooms with TVs for about $10 and plenty of nice places to eat. Our favourite was Il Forno (a surprisingly authentic Italian down an alley off Pub Street) and Le Tigre de Papier (on pub street) that did a great breakfast and Cambodian cooking classes. We also used to meet all the other volunteers for a beer every other Friday at a place called Madame Beergarden which is a cool place for a drink.

We enjoyed our weekends there, especially our Sunday trips to the Old Psaar (market) to pick up supplies for the week. If you ever find yourself in town, pick up a packet of dried mangoes, sour plums and coconut – they are delicious.

Lulu&Mat

Scoreboard Update

In the interests of total transparency when it comes to this competition, we have agreed to share all point-scoring conditions, no matter how nasty. Please look away now if you are of a squeamish disposition…

Having already contracted his and her ticks in the Northern hills of Laos, we wanted to take our coordinating maladies one step further and after a week of itchy bums realized we had matching worms. There is nothing worse than feeling something flip around and wiggle in your bum hole. We named them Whitney and Winston.

As Mat refuses to let me get a point without catching the same thing and equalizing, I upped my game and caught a good dose of crusty pink eye too. Bring it Mr. Cuvelier.

Mat: 13 (previous score) + 1 (arse maggot) = 14 points

Lulu: 9 (previous score) + 1 (arse maggot)  + 1 (pink eye) = 11 points

I’m closing in..

Lulu&Mat

Hometime Crew

Every day as the hometime bell rang, we would go outside to the dusty playground to find out bikes had been wheeled out and were waiting for us. We’d then be escorted all the way home by a rag-tag entourage, singing ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ and shouting ‘Hello’ to everyone we passed.

We called ourselves the Hometime Crew.

Sote, the principle’s son was probably the leader of the pack and Mat would take him on in ‘acrobatic-bike-offs’. As responsible teachers we probably shouldn’t have encouraged this kind of behaviour, but he knew some pretty gnarly tricks.

Hometime crew til we die.

Lulu&Mat

Saved by the Bell

Back when we were planning a long nice walk, we decided we wanted to do some volunteer work on the trip. When we looked into it, it seemed like most organizations all asked for a fee in order to volunteer (anything from 500 to 1500 pounds each!) It seemed weird and we wondered how much of the fee was used to directly support projects and how much of it was used to fund the salaries and running costs of organizations who were arranging the volunteers. It was after looking for ‘free volunteer’ opportunities that we came across ABOUTAsia Schools, based in Cambodia who provide volunteer teachers, supplies, uniforms and computers to forty-eight different schools and 26,000 students in the Siem Reap area.

The more I read up on it, the more interesting it became. It was set up by a high-flying investment banker called Andrew Booth who left London to travel the world and ended up in Cambodia. He set up a company called ABOUTAsia Travel  to provide local jobs in Siem Reap and now works as a full time volunteer, ploughing back all the profits from the travel company into the ABOUTAsia Schools charity. It seemed like a smart and innovative approach to fund the charity using a viable business which also supports local jobs. Win/Win. So, we signed up for three weeks teaching English to primary students in a rural school, 10km outside of Siem Reap.

Every time I pack my backpack, I seem to take out another item of clothing and leave it behind (the mystery is my bag never seems to get any lighter..) By the time we got to Siem Reap, I realised not only was I rocking a capsule wardrobe, but that everything in the my minimalist collection had holes in or looked decidedly hobo. It was time to buy some respectable teacher clothes. Mat had a shirt and trousers (he wore every day) and I got a sarong (impossible to cycle in) and a knock off black GAP t-shirt in the market.

Monday morning arrived and Tola, who works at ABOUTAsia came to pick us up and take us in a tuk tuk to the village. After settling into the house, and a quick shower at the pump, we hopped on our biked and cycled to our first day back at school in 9 years. The kids all have Khmer public school in the mornings, but ABOUTAsia Schools has funded English school in the afternoon from 2-4pm. We were there to assist the English teachers, Sechen, Pong and Lida. We hadn’t appreciated until we arrived that they were only 18 and high school students themselves. They do a great job considering they have little teaching experience and they ended up good friends. We invited them to our house one night for dinner and introduced them to nutella and spaghetti (not together).

Three weeks flew by, we wish we had longer and are already thinking about a return trip. The kids are amazing. They are all mega cute and so keen to learn English, the little ones who are too young to come to class peep in and watch through the windows. It’s incredible how quickly they pick up a language so foreign to Khmer. We did a video project with them (to be released soon!) and introduced them to What’s the Time Mr. Wolf, Duck Duck Goose and I Spy. They taught us how to play flip flop petanque and 50 things you can do with elastic bands.

On our last day, the little girls in my class came up to me and said ”Good luck ‘cher. We love you”. My heart almost burst. I miss them already.

Lulu&Mat

Nectar of the Gods

Every day after school we had a little ritual. A 15 minute cycle down the road to the sugar cane lady who would crush long canes in her machine and give you sweet, yellow nectar in a plastic bag with a straw and ice. All for 12 cents.

It’s joint first place with chai as the best long nice walk beverage.

Lulu&Mat

Cambodian Home Sweet Home

For the first time in 7 months, we stayed still for more than a few days and put down roots in a little rural Cambodian village, an hour outside Siem Reap. We were volunteering, teaching English at Phum Svay village school with a charity called About Asia Schools and they kindly offered us our very own traditional Khmer wooden house on stilts to live in whilst we were there.

We only had two hours of classes a day, plus some private tuition, so we thought we’d have lots of time to chill out and read. As it turned out, in between drawing pictures for class, writing tests and general living, we barely opened a book.

We’d wake up early every morning, but general living seems to take forever when you have no running water. We didn’t have a fridge and nothing keeps in 38 degree heat, so every morning we’d go and buy baguettes and bananas from a lady’s shack on the track, get out a pot of nutella and make a breakfast of champions. Then we’d carry all the washing up to the pump in the garden, machete open a coconut for the chickens, and sweep up any crumbs to deter the rats. By 10am it’s over 30 degrees and we’d be soaked with sweat, so we’d go down to the pump again and have a shower with a bucket whilst everyone cycled through our garden. At 11, it’d be time to go to the shack again and choose the least wrinkly vegetables for lunch. Once we’d cooked that, washed up at the pump again and prepared for class, it was time for school. (We have a massive amount of respect for teachers now, even after 2 hours in the classroom, we were exhausted.) Then we’d cycle to the sugarcane lady, have a juice, pick up some ingredients for dinner and get back home to start cooking before it got dark and the bugs came out. Most nights we flopped into bed shattered by 9pm. And we didn’t even have a rice field to tend to.

There were times, when our bed was invaded by an army of bugs, or when sitting on the hard wooden floor hurt our backs that we looked forward to the creature comforts of our guesthouse in Siem Reap at the weekend, but on the whole, we both said it was, in many ways, the best three weeks of the trip. We got to pick mangoes and coconuts off trees in the garden, we showered in the sunshine, we had incredible neighbours who would bring round cooked meals, little girls from school would come and tie flowers to the cactus plant by our porch, the local guys invited Mat to drink, we managed to cook pretty delicious meals on a camp stove with a head torch (fresh spring roll anyone?) and we had pet chickens! It was Cambodian village life, up close and personal and we loved it.

When we locked up on the last day, I was sad to say goodbye to our little Cambodian home. It was made a little sweeter by all the neighbours who came to wave us off as we bumped out of town on the sandy track in a tuk tuk.

Lulu&Mat

We are Family

Over the course of three weeks, we gradually got acquainted with all sorts of other residents in the house. The weekend before we moved to the village, we met up for a drink with a Kiwi couple who had just finished a month volunteering at our school and living in the house. They gave us lots of tips on what to buy in Siem Reap and what was available in the village, but when they casually dropped into conversation the enormous spider that lived in the outdoor toilet, I saw Mat next to me flinch. Their advice was to name it. Once it was christened Henry, it was less scary.

Our first day in the house, we tentatively went to check out the outhouse and there he was. A big, grey abdomen and thorax, long, thick legs and the size of the palm of my hand. “Errrr….Hello Henry.”

Every trip to the loo was followed by a report on his position and if he’d made any sudden movements. Then one day I shouted out to Mat, “now there’s another one”. This one had what looked like big eyes painted on its back. We called it Jacquie.

Mat started peeing in the garden and avoiding the toilet outside of daylight hours, but for an arachnophobe was coping pretty well. Every morning he’d say, ”I’m just going to see Henry”. We accepted the toilet as their domain and as long as they didn’t scuttle around, we were happy to leave them alone. Encouraged by our hospitality, another two joined the party: Michael and Barney. We lived in harmony until one crept into the curtain by the bed. Not cool spidey. Mat ran out the room whilst I swept it out through a hole in the floorboards. Hero.

Whilst Mat doesn’t like spiders, I’m not a fan of rats. Luckily, to even the phobias out, we had a pack of them too. As well as gnawing through a hole mango that Lida (one of our teachers) gave me from his garden, they staged noisy, squeaking turf wars every night in the roof rafters. We named them Mr. Ratty and the Gang. I gradually started getting used to them too.

Then there was Keith the rooster, Peggie-Sue and Jo-Anne the hens and their brood of chicks who were going through an ugly balding teenage phase whilst their feathers grew in. Between the rats and the chickens, we had our waste disposal sorted. Our favourite housemate was Gordon the foot-long lizard - a vicious hunter who looked like a dwarf dinosaur. And of course, not to forget the intestinal worms we picked up, cheeky little Whitney and Winston.

It took a bit of getting used to, but we all lived happily ever after.

Lulu&Mat&Henry&Jacquie&Michael&Barney&Mr.Ratty&Keith&Peggie-Sue&Jo-Anne& Gordon&Whitney&Winston